Thinking person's hedonists and proud of it

Ruth Park, in A Companion Guide to Sydney, recounted with delight her discovery that the word Sydney derives from Saint Denis, the saint who converted the pagan Gauls to Christianity.

She pointed out that "the name Denis is yet another corruption of the martyr's original Athenian name, Dionysius. Thus we may say that Sydney's patron is Dionysius which, in view of the blithe and irrepressible character of the city as it has developed, is gratifyingly suitable."

The god of wine, music and religious ecstasy. The city built on sandstone, nightly pulsing to dancing, laughter, song. And this is a weekend annually devoted to pleasure. The Sydney Festival, the Moonlight Cinema, the Fringe Festival. Then there's the Big Day Out, the festival that has lasted 12 years and to which 75,000 have bought tickets this weekend - 15,000 more than the Jehovah's Witness convention in December.

When I read Germaine Greer's poorly researched piece this week on why she could not bear to live in Australia, I felt like dragging her along to Homebush Bay on Saturday so she could kick back with some Real Live Young Australians, shake out her mane and watch the muppet-haired rock gods and foxy guitar-slinging women.

In the article, written for British newspapers but reprinted in The Australian on Thursday with a front-page photo of her looking like a madwoman (which our papers love to use when they feature our most famous female intellectual), she railed against our love of spending lazy hours on the beach, drinking beer and listening to bands: "The other great Australian passion is relaxation and I was even less interested in that."

It is not the first time she has complained about it. After the Bali bombing, she wrote that Australia was a place "where relaxation is the aim of life and nothing is to be taken too seriously". Our mantra, she continued, which you might hear uttered hundreds of times a day, was "No worries, mate."

As we ease into a long weekend of taking relaxation seriously her words seem misplaced. It's as though what we do outside the office or study is not counter-cultural, or political, and only saps our brains, rather than scouring them of stress.

At the BDO there are prizes offered for enrolling to vote, and stalls run by unions, environmental groups and peace activists alongside the slurpee sheds and T-shirt tents. It's stupidly crowded, steamy and sweaty, but it has become a ritual.

The creative director and co-founder of the BDO, Ken West, said: "I got the idea of what festivals were about when they were described as tribal gatherings, the new church, a kind of community coming together."

Dionysius's followers were mostly female, and were often called Maenads - madwomen who drank too much, were raucuous, noisy, disobeyed the laws and thumbed their nose at conventions. Much like Greer.

There will be a few at the BDO. At the Lilypad, Machine Gun Fellatio's frontwoman, Krista Hughes, will be hosting a nude aerobics session set to retro music, under the name Heide the Sausage.

The German-based Canadian provocateur Peaches will doubtless be hopping about the stage, hirsute and clad in trademark hotpants.

I'd love to lock her in a room with Greer. Peaches is basically a show-off who loves getting her kit off and saying "c---". Her politics trail somewhere behind her stunts: "If I was in the '70s, I don't know what my take [on women] would be. But now, it seems a bit antiquated. Feminism, like machismo, needs to be flipped on its ass. I find that women talking to women about feminism is didactic. Men should be talking to men about feminism."

Greer's writings on Australia have long been patronising and ill-informed, as though warped by some kind of anger. "If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street," she wrote this week, "where nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie, let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you. I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember.'

It's a shame she was not here to witness the anti-war protests. She had a peculiar litany of complaints: suburbs she called "oil stains on water", a countryside she claimed was deserted, the lack of a rush hour (she obviously hasn't driven around Sydney for a while) and low wages. Her strongest point was about the destruction of our forests - shameful, although hardly unique to Australia.

Greer is not mad. She's an icon who is out of touch. In a glorious salt-encrusted Sydney summer, you can't help but laugh it off. It does not mean we are unthinking or apolitical. Doris Lessing wrote in her biography that all sanity depends on this: "That it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh." And sometimes, as the stars wheel towards Australia Day, or whatever day, and rhetoric about this brown land spills forth, that's enough.